Join us for Co-working Wednesdays, a weekly, low commitment, community networking opportunity held after business hours on Wednesday from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm (during exhibition periods).
From pencil to pixel, Small Frame is an assembly of experimental animated works that foreground technique and material in physical space. Curated by Jenn Tran, the exhibition brings together independent animators Jent Do, Milly Yencken, Quinn Franks, Eleanor Evans, and Tiff Yue — artists working and recognised across Australia and internationally.
Having Swallowed a Mirror meditates on the idea that a portrait of someone else is also a portrait of the artist. This exhibition brings together three early-career artists exploring contemporary portrait painting and suggests that the practice of portrait making is a way of looking inward by looking outward.
Moving in (the next world) builds on Come As You Are, Little Umbrella Collective’s online exhibition, bringing the work into a shared physical environment. The exhibition shifts focus from individual practices to collaboration, imagining the gallery as a space of dwelling. Through painting, textile, sculpture and installation, artists collectively shape a home built through care, access and community.
In the Presence of Self (al-nafs) is grounded in repetition as both a meditative process and a quiet act of resistance, drawing on the spiritual tradition of dhikr (remembrance). The work invites the viewer into a space of tazkiyah (purification and contemplation), where the act of creation becomes ritual, discipline, and inner refinement.
Firstdraft is proud to present our inaugural micro commissioned works.
Water frames displacement and return in Ballast, a work in conversation with Les Kennedy’s unfinished research into the HMAS Sydney II shipwreck and the familial loss it holds.
Drawing from experiences and knowledges across the Great Ocean, fa’alogo ‘o le temporary obstructions is an offering that echoes from Sāmoa, and into the labours of the dispersed.
Message Depth is an installation that examines the hidden infrastructures shaping contemporary life.
Enjoy after hours access to cutting edge exhibitions every Wednesday until 8pm.
Join us from 2-4pm on Saturday 13 December for artist talks with artists from our December exhibitions.
All welcome.
Join us for the last workshop of the semester in our Artist Professional Development Series.
In this informal session, Georgia Boe, curator of Residue, will walk participants through how the exhibition came to be, including working with politically engaged artists and sitting comfortably in this space of discourse.
stockpiler is an installation drawn from the remnants of her childhood garage, a room shaped by generations of quiet accumulation and a mosaic of several conflated identities.
Guess what? In the '70s PM Gough Whitlam held an anthem quest to replace God Save the Queen. The Australian people responded eagerly with entries in notation, lyric and tape-recorded form.
Join us on Friday, December 12th, from 6–10 pm to celebrate our final openings of the year.
Firstdraft is reviving our screening program to support ten artists working across video, film, and screen-based practice. The screening program runs from December 2025 - March 2026, offering multiple perspectives responding to two curatorial premises.
Residue, curated by Georgia Boe as a part of Firstdraft’s First Nations Curator Program, brings together the practices of three artists at different stages of their careers, working in diverse ways with charcoal.
Come As You Are introduces the individual practices that form the foundation of Little Umbrella Collective (LUC).
Join us in the next artist professional development workshop to learn the basics of AV install with Gotaro Uematsu.
Artist Professional Development Program
Join us for the next artist professional development workshop in Navigating Arts Organisations with Kiera Brew Kurec. Kiera will guide you in working with organisations across the sector from ARI's to council led galleries to institutions.
Artist Professional Development Program
Join us for the next artist professional development workshop where you will learn how to write an eye-catching CV and artist bio with Audrey Newton!
Join us in this new community networking opportunity called Co-working Wednesdays, a low commitment weekly event (during exhibition periods) to be held after business hours on Wednesday from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm.
Join us from 2-4pm on Saturday 18 October for artist talks with the October/November exhibitions, including Levent Can Kaya, Sydney Jarrett, Tabitha Lean, Zeinab Mahfoud, Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis, Tanya Cubric, Felix Jackson and Samuel Chan.
Join us from 6-8 pm, for the opening of four new exhibitions including 3 solo exhibitions by Tanya Cubric, Felix Jackson, Samuel Chan and a group exhibition curated by Levent Can Kaya with Sydney Jarrett, Tabitha Lean, Zeinab Mahfoud and Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis.
Fog of war is a military metaphor that has been adopted as a mechanic in strategy-map-based video games. It appears as a darkened foggy area around a player’s avatar or base, differentiating the unexplored from the explored territory on a map shared with hidden enemies.
Penal colony, police state, imperial pawn. From its genesis, Australia has operated as a carceral and militarised state. How are artists responding to a structure that is physical, legal, and material—its legacies and its projections onto other places on the planet? Hijacking, intervention, documentation, glitching—fugitive artistic methods.
Headway is a large-scale installation formed from the remnants of a year-long performance by Felix Jackson. Throughout 2024, Felix wore one new white sock each day on alternating feet. By the end of the year, 366 socks had been collected, each marked with the traces of daily use.
Alina, Olena, Lana and Jana is a single-channel digital video work and installation. It is a re-imagining of four Eastern European characters that Cubric played as an actress for various UK television and stage productions.
Artist Professional Development Program
Artwork install 101 will be a hands-on introduction, covering the end-to-end processes of installing and deinstalling 2D artworks in a gallery setting.
Join us from 2-4pm on Saturday 23 August for artist talks with the August/September exhibitions, including Sue Jo Wright, Mitchell Davis, David Horton, Martin John Oldfield, Jingwei Bu and Belinda Yee.
Jingwei Bu will present a one-on-one, silent tea ceremony ritual. This objectless performance invites individual audience members to enter the tea room and sit opposite the artist on a stack of A4 paper, still and present. Together, they share the quiet ritual and the passing of time, creating a space for reflection, intimacy, and presence.
Mitchell Davis, David Horton and Martin John Oldfield
I Am Not My Father is a multigenerational collaboration exploring the complexities of fatherhood. Each artist brings personal experience—ranging from nurturing relationships to those shaped by absence, neglect, or trauma—into a shared conversation through textiles, sculpture, video, and an original score.
Sue Jo Wright
Labyrinths of Signs is a textile installation body of work by Sue Jo Wright, which explores the journey of identity, belonging, and the discovery of community.
Join us from 6-8 pm, for the opening of four new exhibitions including 3 solo exhibitions by Sue Jo Wright, Jingwei Bu, Belinda Yee and a group exhibition with Mitchell Davis, David Horton and Martin John Oldfield.
Belinda Yee
This exhibition responds to the idea of 'Digital Genocide,' a term coined by Muneera Bano, Principal Research Scientist in Ethics and AI at the CSIRO. It names a hidden violence: the systematic disappearance, distortion, and underrepresentation of cohorts of women in the data that feeds machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Jingwei Bu
We Tea is an immersive installation developed through Bu’s ongoing studio-based tea ceremony practice since 2022. Rooted in intimate gatherings with friends, family, and visitors, each session becomes a durational act of presence where the slow rituals of making and sharing tea quietly document shared time and space.
